Toni Morrison
Nobel laureate exploring African American experience
Most quoted
"Anger...it's a paralyzing emotion...you can't get anything done. People sort of think it's an interesting, passionate, and igniting feeling—I don't think it's any of that—it's helpless...it's absence of control—and I need all of my skills, all of the control, all of my powers...and anger doesn't provide any of that—I have no use for it whatsoever."
— from Interview
"I tell my students, 'When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else.'"
— from Interview with Oprah Winfrey, 2003
"You are your own stories and therefore are free to invent and imagine what you cannot believe, and you are therefore the guides and the tricksters, the evaders and the illusionists, the musicians and the conjurers that are your own best destiny."
— from The Dancing Mind, 1996
All quotes by Toni Morrison (319)
The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.
The world is not a problem to be solved. It is a mystery to be lived.
I write because I have to. It's a compulsion.
If you surrender to the air, you can ride it.
The future was a place where you could make up anything.
Death is a gate. A gate to what? To anything. To nothing. To everything.
The pieces of a broken world were not lost, but merely scattered.
To be a person is to be in the world, and to be in the world is to be in relation to others.
The human mind is a terrible thing to waste.
Knowing what it is to be a victim, you have no right to victimize anyone else.
The only thing they can do is kill you. They can't eat you.
There is a difference between a house and a home. A house is a building, a home is a feeling.
You can't have a good story without a good villain.
It's a good thing to be alive.
The self is a constantly evolving entity.
To be loved, you have to be there.
The world is full of people who are trying to find their way home.
Beauty was not a thing to be acquired or possessed, but a thing to be experienced.
The truth is a mirror, not a window.
There is no such thing as a perfect life.
Contemporaries of Toni Morrison
Other Literatures born within 50 years of Toni Morrison (1931–2019).